Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology by André Breton

Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology Reviews

• 
  Steven Godin

  
  In Paris the tower of Saint-Jacques swaying
  Like a sunflower
  Sometimes runs its brow against the Seine and its shadow
  glides imperceptibly among the tugs
  At that moment on tiptoe in my sleep
  I head for the room where I am lying
  And set fire to it
  So that nothing will remain of the consent wrung from me
  The furniture then makes way for animals of the same size
  looking at me fraternally
  Lions in whose manes the chairs are now burning out
  Sharks whose white bellies absorb the last quivering of the
  sheets
  At the hour of love and of blue eyelids
  I see myself burning in turn I see that solemn hiding place of
  nothings
  
  ****
  
  The Marquis de Sade has gone back inside the erupting
  volcano
  From which he had come
  With his lovely hands still fringed
  His young girl's eyes
  And that rationality on the edge of hurry-scurry which was
  His alone
  But from the phosphorescent salon with viscera lamps
  He has not stopped letting fly those mysterious commands
  That break through the moral light
  Through that breach I can see
  The great cracking shadows the old undermined bark
  Dissolving
  To permit my loving you
  As the first man loved the first woman
  In total freedom
  That freedom
  For which fire itself became man
  For which the Marquis de Sade defied the centuries with his
  great abstract trees
  Of tragic acrobats
  Clutching the gossamer of desire
  
  ****
  
  With one wave of the wand it had been flowers
  And blood
  The ray of light settled on the frozen window
  No one
  Puff it became clear that space was spilling out
  Then the air pillow slipped under the sainfoin
  The avalanches perked up their heads
  And inside the stones shoulders rose up
  Eyes were still closed in the mistrustful water
  From the depths arose the triple collar
  That was to become the pride of the wardrobe
  And the cicadas' song picked up its ticket
  At the station still wrapped in all its strings
  The woman was biting into a steam apple
  On the knees of a large white beast
  In the workshops on the silent benches
  The moon's plane smoothed out the cutting sheets
  And the millstone spit out its butterflies
  
  
  
• 
  Eadweard

  Woman of mine with the back of a bird in vertical flight With a quicksilver back
  A back of light
  With a nape of rolled stone and moist chalk
  And the drop of a glass just drained
  Woman of mine with nacelle hips
  With chandelier and arrow-feather hips
  Like scapes of white peacock plumes
  Of imperceptible sway
  Woman of mine with buttocks of sandstone and amianthus
  Woman of mine with swan’s-back buttocks
  Woman of mine with springtime buttocks
  With the gladiolus sex
  Woman of mine with the placer and platypus sex
  Woman of mine with the sex of seaweed and oldtime sweets
  Woman of mine with the mirror-like sex
  Woman of mine with eyes full of tears
  With violet-panoplied and magnetic-needle eyes
  Woman of mine with savannah eyes
  Woman of mine with eyes of water to be drunk in prison Woman of mine with eyes of wood always under the axe With water-level eyes the level of air earth and fire
  -
  
  
  
  
  I know despair in its broad outlines. Despair has no wings, it is not necessarily found at a cleared table upon a terrace, in the evening by the seaside. It is despair and it is not the return of a quantity of little facts like seeds leaving one furrow for another at nightfall. It is not moss upon a stone or a drinking glass. It is a boat riddled with snow, if you please, like birds falling, and their blood has not the slightest thickness. I know despair in its broad outlines. A very small form, fringed by jewels of hair. It is despair. A necklace of pearls for which a clasp can never be found and whose existence does not hold even by a thread, that is despair.'As for the rest, let’s not speak of it. We haven’t finished despairing if we begin. I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan around midnight, I despair of the condemned man’s last cigarette. I know despair in its broad outlines. Despair has no heart, the hand always remains in despair out of breath, in despair whose death we are never told about by mirrors. I live off this despair which so enchants me. I love that blue fly streaking in the sky at the hour when the stars hum their song. I know in its broad outlines despair with its long, slim breaches, the despair of pride, the despair of anger. I rise every day like everyone and I stretch out my arms on a flowered wall paper, I remember nothing and it is always with despair that I discover the lovely uprooted trees of the night. The air of the room is lovely like drumsticks. It is time weather. I know despair in its broad outlines. It is like the curtain wind giving me a helping hand. Can you imagine such despair: Fire, fire! Ah they are still going to come . . . Help! There they are falling down the stairs . . . And the newspaper advertisements, and the illuminated signs along the canal. Sandpile, go on with you, you old sandpile! In its broad outlines despair has no importance. It is a drudgery of trees that is going to make a forest again, a drudgery of stars that is going to make one less day again, a drudgery of days fewer which will again make up my life.
  -
  
  
  
  
  Patient and curved the lovely shadow walks round the paving stones
  The Venetian windows open and close upon the square Where beasts move freely fires trailing
  Wet streetlamps rustle in a frame of swarming blue eyes That cover the landscape upstream from the town
  This morning prow of the sun how you steep yourself in the
  superb songs sighed in a traditional mode behind the curtains by the naked women keeping watch
  While the giant arum lilies turn about their waist
  The bloody mannequin hopping on all three feet in the attic
  He’s coming they say arching their necks where the bounce of braids sets free faintly pink glaciers
  That split under the weight of a ray of light falling from the torn-off blinds
  He’s coming it’s the glass-toothed wolf
  Who eats up time in little round boxes
  Who blows the overpungent fragrances of herbs
  Who smokes little guide fires in the turnips at evening The columns of the great apartments of marble and vetiver cry out
  They cry caught in those to-and-fro motions which until then enlivened only certain colossal castings in factories The motionless women on turntables will see
  There is daylight on the left but night has completely fallen on the right
  There are branches still full of birds that darken the gap in the casement window as they speed by
  White birds laying black eggs
  Where are those birds replaced now by stars edged with twin strands of pearls
  -
  
  
  
  
  
  There is
  By my leaning over the precipice
  Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret
  Of loving you
  Always for the very first time
  -
  
  
  
  
  
  The benches of the outer boulevards bend down in time under the embrace of vines that light up softly in a spangle of beautiful eyes and lips. While they appear vacant to us, around them those ardent flowers continue to flutter and infuse each other. They are to translate in concrete terms the adage of mythographers according to which the gravitational pull of heavenly bodies is allegedly a characteristic of space and carnal desire the daughter of that characteristic but which altogether forgets to specify that it is up to the daughter, for the ball, to adorn the mother. A single breath is sufficient to set free those myriads of egrets bearing achenes. Between their upward and their downward flight along the endless curve of desire all the signs encompassed by the celestial score are set down in harmony.
  .
• 
  Edita

  When the windows like the jackal’s eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings’ steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers’ corks.
  *
  I caress all that you were
  In all that must still be you
  *
  In your voice trills of lost birds give themselves a lift
• 
  hh

  i have a push-pull relationship with surrealism. some of it grabs me and some of it i find unbearably dull. breton tends to be on the better end of the spectrum for me. i don't have any french, so i cannot compare the translation to the original (included here, which i prefer even when i can't read it). the english versions generally hold up well to my ear, although they don't always provide the element of linguistic surprise that i expected.
  
  "No Grounds" ("Non-lieu") was a favorite of mine, including the gorgeous line "Take even the threads holding up the steps of the ropewalkers and the drops of water"
  
  Also:
  
  "There is
  that leaning over the precipice
  of the hopeless fusion of your presence and absence
  I have found the secret
  of loving you
  always for the first time"
  -from the book AIRWATER
• 
  Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett

  These poems are very good. I'm deeply engaged right now with surrealist poetry; obviously, Breton, as the movement's founder and philosopher is a must read.
  
  In terms of the content and effect of the poems, not what they DO, I enjoyed Paul Eluard's work a bit more. It may be my difficulty in still holding on to SOME sort of traditional hand hold on meaning; but, I think it's also something else. While Breton is certainly more "wild" and what Robert Bly would call "leaping" than Eluard, Eluard's poems have a spiritual longing and sweetness that I find at TIMES in Breton, but not as often or as deeply. As surrealist poets, they are both obviously interested in the poem as performance-so I'll put it this way. Breton may be a better actor than Eluard, but I like Eluard's roles more.
• 
  Hallie Lauinger

  i am out of breath. i began crying upon beginning this book and was dumbfounded as i felt i could understand none of it. then i read bretons first manifesto of surrealism and it all made sense. he merges “reality” with dreams. this writing is completely new to me - images and sparks of unintentional beauty previously unobtained - images attesting to the fact that the mind is ripe for something other than the benign joys it allows itself in general.
• 
  GENESIS

  A poetic embrace like a lovers’ embrace
  As long as it lasts
  Shuts out all the woes of the world.
  
  When they make sense, they make the absolute sense. When they don't, well, he's still Breton. I'll always love and tolerate him.
• 
  J.M. Hushour

  Surprisingly not very interesting, considering it's Breton we're talking about here. About half the poems are tedious and one gets the sense that at some points in his literary career as the vanguard of Surrealism Breton was either trying too hard or not trying enough. That said, some of the pieces here are really, really, really good, and the ones that aren't might just be due to the translations. The few poems included in this volume that I've read by other translators read completely differently under the brain of another, so that might account for the uneven nature of this collection.
• 
  Amanda Astrid

  i think the translations in this are quite weak -- i am not that great with french, but even i found myself scribbling in my own translations because i felt so unfulfilled by the english versions in this.
• 
  George

  This is another fine title from Black Widow Press, casting a wide net across the waters of Breton's work.
• 
  Donald Armfield

  A large collection of Brenton's work some interesting lines. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of these two collections as stand alones.
  
  *Clair De Terre
  
  *Le Revolver Á Cheveux Blancs
• 
  Peter

  me likey the surrealism